Today, as the U.S. President considers military action in Venezuela, the parallels between Noriega and Maduro grow more and more significant, and some Panamanian officials hope the Venezuelan president will meet a similar fate. More recently, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., an ally of Rubio, warned in a late September interview that Maduro might “rot in jail for the rest of his life like Noriega.” The U.S. may be deterred from major military action in Venezuela by the scale of the challenge. And both are drug traffickers. In September, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Maduro was “one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world.” The Venezuelan leader, she added, “will not escape justice.” And like Noriega, who ran Panama though puppet politicians, Maduro is considered an illegitimate ruler by the United States because of the fraudulent elections that have kept him in power since 2013.
Noriega may be gone, but his story has not been forgotten — not by Maduro, Maria Machado, or U.S. administration officials, many of whom have spent years trying to topple the Venezuelan leader. If Maduro is removed he said, José and his family would return to Venezuela where he has a farm, and had a good job and life. Among the options U.S. officials considered at the time were a large-scale U.S. invasion of the country and “a smaller, special operation targeted directly at Maduro,” former defense secretary Mark Esper wrote in a 2022 memoir.
And U.S. officials maintain that the Venezuelan is not a foreign leader but a criminal who must be “brought to justice,” as Venezuelan leader Maria Corina Machado says and echoed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently. In a national address announcing the invasion of Panama, President George H.W. Bush pictured below, laid out his grounds for moving against Noriega, a defiant nationalist who brandished a machete in public and hosted cocaine-fueled parties at his lavish mansions. The Justice Department had indicted him on charges of taking huge bribes in return for letting drug traffickers’ ship cocaine through his country. “I directed our armed forces to protect the lives of American citizens in Panama and to bring Gen. Noriega to justice in the United States,” Bush said.
“There are parallels with Noriega,” said Elliott Abrams, who served as U.S. special envoy for Venezuela. “One is that the guy running the government is someone we do not view as a legitimate head of government.” “When people talk very loosely and say, ‘Well, we’ll just take him out,’ it’s useful to recall 1989,” said Michael Shifter, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service with extensive experience in Latin America. “When one confronts the realities of what it would require, you conclude how crazy it would be to commit American troops for regime change in Venezuela,” he added. They included Noriega’s dictatorial rule, concerns about the security of the Panama Canal, and the brash general’s increasing hostility toward the United States.
Any U.S. effort to apprehend or kill Maduro, they say, would be far more treacherous than the operation to corral Noriega. It is a story Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro surely knows well. But like Noriega, Maduro has also been federally indicted on drug trafficking charges. Panama was an easy target — a small country with a weak military, and in 1989, U.S. troops were already stationed there guarding the Panama Canal. Venezuela is about 12 times larger than Panama, with a population more than 10 times greater than Panama’s in 1989. The playlist was designed for maximum stress — and ridicule: Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive,” Van Halen’s “Panama,” Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
Brent Scowcroft, who was serving as national security adviser to Bush, later called the tactic “a low moment in U.S. Army history.” But Noriega eventually surrendered and was hauled to Florida for trial. During a visit to Panama City in 2015, Maduro stopped to lay a wreath at a memorial to Panamanians killed in the U.S. invasion. “This machete represents the dignity and courage of the Panamanian people,” Noriega said. The Venezuelan leader has also invoked the memory of 1989, weaving it into a larger narrative about his defiance of what he calls American imperialism. And even the puny Panama Defense Forces put up enough resistance to kill 23 U.S. troops, including four of the elite Navy SEALS who carried out the assault on Noriega’s jet.
U.S. officials say he is more accurately described as a criminal cartel leader. As a Republican senator from Florida in 2019, Rubio, pictured above, posted images on Twitter of several toppled dictators in what was widely seen as a warning to Maduro, as domestic unrest and U.S. pressure mounted. The United States has estimated that 314 Panamanian soldiers and 202 civilians died during the operation which is so far from reality that it was ridiculous to hear back then, and especially today. As the assault began, a panicked Noriega, accompanied by a mistress, wove through Panama City in an unmarked Hyundai and went into hiding. At one point, he ducked incognito into a Dairy Queen before taking refuge in the embassy of the Holy See in Panama City.
Delta Force commandos and U.S. Army tanks quickly surrounded the building, which they could not storm, and demanded his surrender. “Never again a U.S. invasion in Latin America,” he declared. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, then the national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence and now a presidential envoy to Ukraine, had firsthand experience in Panama as an infantry assault commander during the operation. They include one unsuccessful push to oust Maduro, which sought to capitalize on the street protests across Venezuela in 2019. Maduro also enjoys a “highly skilled” inner ring of protection, Abrams said, with an elite force of bodyguards supplied by his close political allies in nearby Cuba. Maduro pictured above, in other words, would be unlikely to be found hiding out in a Dairy Queen.
It is a story that the Panamanian people know all too well. Talk with any Panamanian cab or Uber driver to hear their side of the story. The count of Panamanians killed is in the thousands. Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. efforts to depose hostile Latin American rulers have largely been failures. They included before-and-after shots of Noriega — first waving his machete before a crowd, next posing for his federal mug shot. But the similarities between Panama 1989 and Venezuela 2025 are dangerously misleading, some analysts warn. Speak with the groups in Panama that are still unearthing bodies of relatives. Still, experts say the similarities between 1989 and today must be unsettling to Maduro.
As Operation Just Cause began, a team of Navy SEALs crept onto an airfield and blasted Noriega’s personal Learjet with an anti-tank gun. He was convicted and spent the rest of his life in prison until just before his death in 2017 in a Panamanian hospital after brain surgery. A Latin American strongman was in hiding, surrounded by U.S. troops, heavy metal blaring through the night. For Noriega, escape was never an option. In April 1988, he thrilled a crowd when he concluded a fiery anti-U.S. speech by smashing a podium with his machete. Recently I took an Uber into downtown with a driver named José, an oil and gas engineer from Venezuela who escaped with his wife two years ago, and is now driving a me around town. We talked politics. Time will tell………
